Clowns

All the Useful Idiots

Chill Clowns, Evil

And all the good little Putin-worshipping libs tell me the Russians just want to enclose the Ukrainians in their warm embrace because those Russians filled to the brim with bonhomie and good cheer think the Ukrainians are “really” Russian.

Idiots. Useful idiots.

In reality, the agenda is genocide and the embrace is one of white phosphorous, Semtex and thermite.

Lar

Chill Annoying, Clowns

The right’s hatred of solar and wind power is deeply stupid and it makes no sense at all. There’s a reason China is installing more of these power types than anything else.

As of 2024:

  • China installed over 217 gigawatts of solar just in that year, which is more than the entire cumulative U.S. total in its entire history.
  • The United States has around 160 GW of total installed solar capacity, ever.

China has over 600 GW of solar now, while we’re still crawling with less than a third of that. And slowing down due to utter fucking moron MAGA clowns.

Solar and wind are now super-cheap, efficient, and far cleaner than fossil fuels. Despite a lot of you living in the late 1970s, they’re not some hippie pipe dream. Nope, it’s hard economic pragmatism. Even authoritarian regimes know renewables are the way to go and in fact are the future.

Get out of 1979, idiots.

Smoking Eth

Chill Annoying, Clowns

This always makes me laugh when doofclown dipshits say things like, “But solar uses sooo much landddddddd!”

Compared to the worse-in-every-way ethanol, nope. And we’re already wasting land on that. And another difference is that solar is actually good.

Low Tol

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Rant

I too have far less tolerance for that kinda shit than I used to.

The idiot liberal idea that wild-eyed vagrants can have a little assault as a treat is so fucking insane. And #MeToo went right out the window when it was the so-called unhoused perpetrating sex crimes, didn’t it?

Even apart from any political considerations, I despise hypocrites.

1990s Design

Chill Clowns, Tech

Some thoughts on IPv6.

That is pretty stupid and clueless.

I understand IPv6 just fine and have set it up from scratch many times in large networks.

So I can very confidently say that it really sucks. It was designed in the 1990s before we understood any of the problems we’d be facing in the 2020s. And it shows. It’s creaky and ill-suited to its actual use. It has security assumptions that aged poorly (IPSec everywhere? Sure, Jan.) and features that will never be used. It’s mostly cruft and useless crap with some ok functionality if you’re using dial-up.

First, its human-unfriendly addressing makes diagnostics, documentation, and training way harder. No fucking one alive can remember or understand just by looking at it what 2001:0db8:85a3::8a2e:0370:7334 means or does. (For my non-techies, that is an IPv6 address, like 192.168.1.1 in IPv4).

Additionally, no matter what you’ve read, NAT actually is a great security feature and IPv6 only begrudgingly supporting this is clownish and harmful1.

The crack I made about dial-up earlier was actually leading to something. IPv6 was designed long before cloud-native networking became a thing. That means it was created when it was implicitly assumed that all hosts had one interface and one static address. These days, containers, VMs and ephemeral workloads are dominant. IPs change all the time, get re-assigned and altered, sometimes every few seconds. IPv6’s assumption of a static architecture makes it poorly-suited to dynamic cloud environments.

Also, for we admins, things like stateless address auto-configuration (SLAAC) and router advertisements give us less control. We actually need this control and visibility for security and observability. Allowing IPv6 to do its black-box magic is not any advantage for us. It is in fact actively harmful and makes networks much harder to secure and administer.

IPv6 also assumes end-to-end connectivity is a good thing — that everything should have a public IP address and be on the public internet 24/7 (related to my point about NAT above). Bro, I don’t want my washing machine or toaster on the internet. Trust.

Subnetting in IPv6 is also absolute crap. “Just use a /64 everywhere!” Why, god, why? This just adds complexity, not reduces it. Insanely dipshitty.

And don’t get me started on the fucking idiotic link-local address. For those not in the know, in IPv6 every interface gets assigned a link-local address to talk to its neighbors. This is bad! It’s not routable, is a security hole, it causes problems in logging and diagnostics and with multi-hop while being confusing and inobvious to most network admins.

Of course, IPv6 also replaced ARP with NDP. This inefficient-as-all-hell turd of a protocol has more useless steps, a larger (and difficult-to-audit) attack surface, is far, far more fragile and requires complex (and also fragile) firewalling. The clowns replaced a dumb but reliable protocol (ARP) with an insecure, “smart” but fragile one. Great job.

It also has crap DNS integration. The designers back in the 1990s assumed we’d use an IP address for everything. Hostnames and DNS were an afterthought. Meanwhile, DNS is used for absolutely everything these days.

IPv6 also makes network planning far harder. Global prefix delegation, renumbering, and prefix lifetimes are a goddamn nightmare. Get it right the first time or you are screwed (ask me how I know).

And, related to a point above, IPv6 was designed for well-structured pre-built networks with planned addressing, stable routers, and consistent ownership. That means it really does not work well with mesh networks, ad-hoc clusters, cloud VMs that spin up/down in seconds, serverless functions…I could go on.

IPv6 is like giving a skateboard to a donkey. Sure, theoretically it might be able to get wherever it’s going faster. But what the hell is a donkey going to do with a skateboard in reality?

(Source: I am an active CCNP, have worked in tech for 20+ years, and have designed hundreds of IPv4 and IPv6 networks from the ground up and then built them out myself, often purchasing all the required hardware as well.)

  1. No, NAT shouldn’t be your only security feature. But it works well and is far better than nothing, which is what most would have otherwise.

Rupt

Chill Clowns, Evil

I also think that effect is hugely underestimated. The Covidians are hopeless; they are convinced there was no disruption and no lockdown anywhere because government thugs didn’t come around welding your door shut. Unless, that is, you were in China.

But even among thoughtful people I believe the effects of the unforced Covid disruptions are not understood nor accounted for. And the more I examine the aftermath the more my evaluation seems to me to be leaning correct. Supermarkets never recovered; I have not seen a fully-stocked one since 2019. Staff in retail establishments are more listless and service is worse everywhere. Attendance to everything from concerts to sporting events is down and public transit in most places never returned to its previous level of ridership. And we all retreated into digital fortresses, with no signs of any emergence.

Something shifted when we broke society. And it will never I guess shift back.

Attack

Chill Annoying, Clowns

Exactly. Most women have no idea how much stronger the average man is than they are.

My dad was not violent. My mom was, though. And unpredictably so. One day she got mad at my dad and started attacking him, hitting him in the face and chest. Eventually he grew tired of the abuse and just to get her away from him, he lightly (for him) swatted her on the shoulder. He didn’t intend to hurt her and in fact did not. However, she went flying halfway across the room and and landed hard on her ass.

My mom was not weak (being a waitress at the time) but my dad was probably somewhere around 6-8x as strong as she was. Now, sure, my dad was unusually strong. He was built like a bear and I saw him lift 500-pound iron engine blocks without much effort. But it wasn’t really until that moment that I realized just how vastly more physically powerful my dad was than my mother.

I’d never hit my partner unless she turns into a zombie or something. And I’m nowhere near as strong as my dad was (despite all my working out), but I’m quite sure I can punch 3-5x as hard as she can. I’m stronger. My arms weigh a lot more. I have more fast-twitch muscle. And I’ve thrown many, many punches in my life. But most of my advantages there are genetic in nature and not due to my experience and training.

No matter what nonsense you’ve read, men and women just are not built the same. It’s a liberal fantasy that is completely untrue.

Dark Light

Chill Annoying, Clowns

Agreed. The pseudo-historians are wrong, wrong, wrong about this. The Dark Ages definitely occurred, and were pretty stygian indeed. Anything from that era looks like absolute shit compared to the Roman or even earlier Greek high culture eras.

Why historians need to deny the Dark Ages occurred is complex, but mostly has to do with the fact that they do not believe human culture should be judged at all, partially due to the leftist implicit (and sometimes explicit) embrace of Islamofascism after 9/11. And culture very much should be judged.

Fit Fits

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Rant

It is a truth not so universally acknowledged that an “ugly” woman or an “undesirable” man can look pretty damn good by losing some weight, spending some time in the gym, having a decent haircut and wearing clothes that fit correctly.

But ain’t no wailing wallower want to hear that shit. Or make that effort.